A couple of months ago I innocently asked a girl from my gym who had a boyfriend to go paddleboarding with me because she wanted to learn. Anyway we got on really well and over the course of the week kept meeting up alone to swim and paddleboard. Eventually I told her I couldn’t go on seeing her alone as I realised I like her. Surprisingly she said she felt the same. Anyway we kissed and ended up having sex.
She then broke up with her boyfriend and moved a bit away to live with her parents. But I still see her regularly at the gym, we text everyday for two months but meet up less regularly. She is so busy at the moment and has a lot going on with her break up etc as they had two houses to sort out. She’s going to be moving to within 5 mins away from me in a couple of weeks.
The main issue I have is although we get on so well, she still wants it to be a secret I’m seeing her so I haven’t been able to tell anyone as we go to a CrossFit gym everyone knows eachothers business. But she definitely says she also doesn’t want a relationship at the moment and wants to be by herself. Yet she stayed and mine last week (again we had sex) and the strange thing is she rings me everyday (sometimes twice). She says because she is too busy to meet up at the moment she just enjoys speaking to me. I really like this girl and obviously want her to be my girlfriend so do I just carry on and wait it out or tell her to stop ringing me unless it’s to meet up but then I may lose her?
Not sure how I should play this.
Peter
Wow. My red flags really starting flapping when I read your question.
Why does she want your involvement to be a secret?
My first thought was that she is worried that the news would get back to her ex. Then I wondered if she’d actually ended it with her “ex”.
Maybe these concerns of mine are wrong, but one thing is sure, she is not jumping in with both feet to be with you.
Maybe she just has cold feet due to her failed relationship with the ex. She did say she doesn’t want a relationship now.
On the other hand, she reaches out to you every day and enjoys speaking with you.
Issuing her an ultimatum is going to push her away. Pushing her for more will backfire bigtime, as you suspect. When we push another person, the result is a doubling down of the other person’s position or feelings. As Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order said: When you want to influence another person, you should enter through his door and have him leave through yours. A similar concept is the old adage if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
My suggestion is to cool your jets and give her some room to develop a friendship with you. As you know, a solid friendship is the foundation of any good romantic relationship. Let her develop a sense of safety and trust in your friendship.
Don’t push her to see you. And let her control the pacing of when you meet.
And I also suggest you use a technique called joining. In joining, you embody the other person’s feelings. When you “carry” the other person’s feelings it makes it easier for the person to ease up on his/her position. In this case, you would embody her reluctance to jump into a relationship. To do this, you wait for her to ask to meet. And don’t have sex when she sees you. While you may be tempted to have sex, the intensification of her feelings for you will likely backfire and she will pull back afterwards.
To complete the joining, when you see her, you be the one to voice her reluctance to enter a relationship by saying that you are scared to become deeply attached and hurt as a result; For this reason, you want to be friends for now.
By joining her fear, and not pushing her, her walls should come down and then she should be willing to move forward.
While you’re building a friendship, use the time to find out more about her past relationship. What went wrong? What was her role in the recent relationship failure? What went wrong in her former relationship provides clues as to what could go wrong in her relationship with you. What you want to look for is her level of insight into herself. And whether she is willing to own her own part of the relationship failure. If she says that the breakup was all his fault, then you will need to be concerned that she may not take equal responsibility in any future relationship with you.
The more you know, the better you will be able to evaluate her limitations and determine whether her cold feet are due only to the recent breakup or symptomatic of deeper problems that cause her to have relationship difficulties.
Let me know how you make out.
